This was taken a couple of weeks ago. Yes, it was this glorious in the middle of winter #nofilter.

The garden is starting to wake up a lot earlier than usual, the almond tree is in blossom and the daffodils are nearly in bloom. I was pottering in the greenhouse on the weekend and it was just under 30 degrees celsius. I could feel summer calling.

This has got me thinking about what we’re going to do in the garden this year. I’m all about setting goals and I love to plan. I don’t always see things through though, but that’s mostly because I set many, many goals or just unrealistic goals.

This year my goal for the garden is to grow most of the food that we eat for as long as possible. This means:

• Trying out no dig – there’s a reason why the grapes do so well in Martinborough, it’s because the soil is crap. The grapes like to struggle but my vegetables do not. I’m hoping this will make help us to improve the quality of the soil in our veg beds.
• Mulch, water, and shade – Summertime can be hot and humid here in South Wairarapa. We started to get on top of watering systems last year on a few of our beds and the greenhouse. This year, we’re going to expand on it and improve it. We’ll also get a lot of mulch and use some of the shade cloth we already have for when things get too hot.
• Continuous planting – The other thing I’ve struggled with is having a continuous supply of seedlings to replace what we’ve harvested. So, I’m going to come up with a plan to start seedlings every other week. I have plenty of people that I can pass the surplus on to but this means…
• Using the greenhouse differently – Our greenhouse gets too hot in the middle of summer to grow too much successfully. I’m going to carve out more of a space for growing seedlings. I will continue to grow some things that have done well in there during summer such as peppers and cucumbers. I’m pretty sure that we could have kept our tomatoes going through winter if we had planted a later crop, so I’m going to try giving that a go. We’ll also make some improvements like increasing the number of vents and putting some gravel down on the path to make it easier to walk on. The significant other wants to try aquaponics but I’m not too sure this will make it’s way on to the do do list.
• Preserving – This winter I bought a pressure canner and have been experimenting with it. So far I’ve preserved a lot of jams, sauces, and chicken stock. I also ferment a few things so hopefully I’ll be able to do a lot more this.

There’s probably some more things that we’ll do, like growing a wider range of vegetables, and trying new recipes. But i’ll tell you more about that as I go.